What have I been doing??

Hi,

Loved the topic this week because it has made me realise how little I think about what my PowerPoint look like when I am explaining a topic or concept. Part of this is to do with time constraints when planning and prepping. Normally, I will find a pre-made presentation from the internet off a teacher resource website, edit as quickly as possible, mainly to remove slides where the content doesn’t match the goal of the lesson or ability of the class, maybe reduce the text or add some extra images and voila PowerPoint is ready to go!! Sometimes during lessons, I will find myself thinking “Ohh this PowerPoint isn’t great” but when it is something that might only take up 10mins of your lesson I think it is natural that it slips down the priority list when planning. I hope that I am not the only teacher who falls into this trap and I do know that this is something that I will not be able to change instantly or for every lesson, as it is just not feasible time wise to have a perfect presentation ready to go and sometimes the time is better spent improving the activities or resources that the children will use. However, it is something that I will be able to work towards and build on with practice.

I felt the ideas from the Presentation Zen: Overview video were excellent although ironically I found the presentation itself quite boring. I think the main idea that I will take from it is to plan out my presentations away from the computer so I can think clearly about what I want my message to be or what I want the children to learn from the presentation. I also liked the idea of making it clear that the slides should not stand on their own and should only support the speaker. This is something I have found that children commonly do when creating their own presentations and explaining to them that if the slide “says everything they are going to say, why are they up there?” is a good way of showing them how they can improve their presentation skills. Jeff’s video explaining how he uses these principles gave some good practical examples and focused on the importance of finding the correct image and having the patience to keep searching to find one.

Course3 Creating a Presentation from Jeff Utecht on Vimeo.

Other articles that I would recommend checking out and have given me some good ideas for future presentations include this Ted article which gives 10 tips to improve your presentations, this Presentation Zen article which gives some great before and after comparisons of slides which have been improved using Presentation Zen principles, and finally this useful color theory infographic which is helpful when choosing colour for your background and fonts.

Courtesy of: Designmantic.com
So I have taking these ideas and decide to apply it to my one use of Prezi so far. This presentation was for an introduction to a gifted and talented writer’s workshop I was doing in school and was just an outline of the day so the children knew what they were doing for the day.

Looking at the presentation now, in light of what I have learned this week I can see there are a number of ways to improve it. Firstly, I will ditch using Prezi, as really the transitions are not adding to the presentation so are not needed and I find Prezi more awkward to use compared to Google Slides or PowerPoint. Secondly and most strikingly, where are my images!! Looking back on this, I can’t believe I did not include images in this presentation. The other presentations I used during the day (for each different topic) had some great visuals to provoke discussion but the introduction is lacking in those. Thirdly, I will reduce the text on the slide (hopefully this will be easier to do with good supporting images) and focus on one or two key words for each slide. Finally, I will try to be a bit more creative in my placement of text and images so everything is not centered.

Here is the updated presentation and I am happier with it. I think the images work well but I really appreciate what Jeff was saying cause it took a long time to find them and the temptress of Google Images (without advanced search) kept calling but I persevered!! Let me know what you think!

Cheers,

Paul